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The HIT Lab NZ has just released a professional version of it’s popular BuildAR AR scene building tool. This allows non-programmers to easily build AR scenes. The professional version includes a number of new features such as support for audio and video, multiple objects on AR markers, 2D image and text loading, VR viewing mode, and much more.

The software is available as a free beta now, and then will be commercially available for a low cost from July onwards. It can be downloaded from: http://www.buildar.co.nz/

Using BuildAR Pro, compelling AR scenes can be build in just a few minutes.

Here are 2 game prototypes the team created called AR Gardener and Sketch-Chaser. It is played on a regular white board.

AR Gardener

Draw symbols on the white board and 3D content is pulled from a database of objects to appeas in an Augmented Reality (AR) scene.

The sketch determines what object to create, its location, scale, and rotation.

The outer line sketched here defines the game anchor and is served for tracking; in this game it becomes a brown ridge.

Simple symbols drawn generate a couple of benches, a cabin, and in the spirit of the playground theme – rockers, and swings.

Virtual elements could also be created based on a real life object such as a leaf; here it is used to create a patch of grass using the color and shape of the leaf (and no, it can’t recognize that’s a leaf, or 3D object whatsoever)

The color of the marker could define the type of virtual object created: For example, blue represents water. Other objects that are put in it will sink.

Sketch-Chaser

In the second game you basically create an obstacle course for a car chase.

It’s a “catch the flag” or tag game. The winner is whoever has the flag for the most time.

First you draw, then play.

Once again, the continuous brown line represents a ridge and bounds the game.

A small circle with a dot in it represents the starting point for the cars.

A flag becomes the flag to capture. A simple square creates a building, etc.

The player adds more ridges to make it more challenging. Adds blue to generate a little pond (which also indicates a different physical trait to this area)

Then – graphics are generated, the players grab their beloved controllers and the battle begins!

This research represents an opportunity for a whole new kind of game experience that could make kids play more in the real world.

Many questions still remain, such as how do you recognize in a sketch what the player really means without requiring her to be an artist or an architect. Or where does the sketch fit in the game play? Before, after or during?

Now, it’s up to game designers to figure out what sketching techniques work best, what’s fun, what’s interesting, and what’s just a doodle.

If you are still contemplating whether to go – check out what you might be missing on our preview post.

The folks from the Visual Media Lab at Ben Gurion University in collaboration with HIT Lab NZ are preparing a real treat for ISMAR 2009 participants.

Sketch recognition (already covered in our previous post) is a major break away from “ugly” markers or NFT (tracking natural 2d images). It is the dawn of user generated content for Augmented Reality, and an intuitive new interaction approach for changing the CONTENT overlaid on a marker. Big wow.

In-Place 3D Sketching

But the team lead by Nate Hagbi and Oriel Bergig (with support from Jihad El-Sana and Mark Billinghurst) is just warming up…In the next video Nate shows how any sketch you draw on a paper (or even on your hand!) can be tracked.

So are you telling me I won’t need to print stuff every time I want to play with augmented reality?
-That’s right! Hug a tree and save some ink!

Shape Recognition and Pose Estimation

But wait, there is more!

Nate says this demo already runs on an iPhone.

And to prove it, he is willing to share the code used to access the live video on iPhone 3.0.(note: this code accesses a private API on the iPhone SDK)

Ready for the BIG NEWS?

For the first time ever, the core code necessary for real augmented reality “(real” here means precise alignment of graphics overlaid on real life objects) on iPhone 3.0 is available to the public.

Here are 2 research results, to be introduced at ISMAR, from one of the most prolific AR labs in the world: HIT Labs NZ, courtesy of Mark Billinghurst:

Embedded AR

We have been developing AR software for the Beagle Board OMAP3 development kit. This allows you to run a whole AR system on a $150 piece of embedded hardware and use Linux for development. The OMAP 3 chip is the same that is in many new smart phones so it is a great way to do some benchmarking and prototyping for mobile phone AR applications.

If EmbeddedAR will have similar adoption to the open source Artoolkit, then we’ll soon see AR-enabled devices popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Potentially very cool.

Android AR

We have been developing our own mobile outdoor AR platform based on the Android operating system. We are using GPS and compass information to overlay 3D virtual models on the real world outdoors. Unlike some other systems we support full 3D model loading and also model manipulation, plus rendering effects such as shadows etc.

That’s not as new. Rouli would categorize it as a YAARB™ (Yet Another AR Browser…)
Wikitude and Layar (as well as other browsers) have similar capabilities (or will soon have), and are already open and accessible to many developers.

ARToolworks is very pleased to announce that it is able to offer commercial licenses for the popular FLARManager software. FLARManager is a software framework developed by Eric Socolofsky that makes building FLARToolKit Flash based Augmented Reality applications easier.

FLARManager decouples the marker-tracking functionality from Papervision3D, and provides a more robust event-based system for managing marker addition, update, and removal. It supports detection and management of multiple patterns, and multiple markers of a given pattern.

Most importantly, FLARManager sits on top of FLARToolKit and makes it much faster and easier to develop flash based AR applications, typically half the time or less of developing a straight FLARToolKit application.

Philip Lamb, CTO of ARToolworks, says “We are delighted to be able to provide commercial license for this outstanding tool. This will enable FLARToolKit developers to build Flash AR applications quicker than ever before, and is the perfect compliment to our existing product line.”

FLARManager will continue to be freely available under a GPL license from http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://transmote.com/flar/, but ARToolworks has the exclusive rights to sell commercial licenses to those companies that do not want to share the source code of their applications as required by the GPL license.

The developer of FLARManager, Eric Socolofsky, says, “I’m excited to be able to offer FLARManager to both the commercial and experimental community. FLARManager began as an effort to bring FLARToolkit to a wider audience, and this commercial license will help to expand the reach of augmented reality and new interfaces to the web.”

For a limited time, ARToolworks is selling FLARManager for a reduced price of only $295 USD for a single product license, and also selling a discounted bundle of FLARToolKit and FLARManager licenses together. FLARToolKit is required to use FLARManager.

These games use social dynamics and real world contexts to enhance game play…and can create compelling educational and engaging environments for learners…help develop 21 century skills…tackle complex problems…and acquire information in just-in-time fashion”

Cavanaugh explores a (surprisingly large) number of educational games developed in the last 4 years:

Most were designed to teach concepts in scientiﬁc systems, and the remaining AR games focus on the difﬁcult-to-master, ill- deﬁned domains of communication, managing data collected in the ﬁeld, problem solving, and understanding cultural and historic foundations of a region.

Based on that list, here is an (alphabetical) culmination of mobile educational games in recent history:

Outdoor GPS-based Augmented Reality game for teenagers. Players team up as experts including scientists, public health experts, and environmental specialists to analyze and solve an outbreak of illness coinciding with a major event in the Boston Metro Area.

Learning the cultural history of the Middle Rhine Valley for adults. Learners alternate between problem solving using video of the castle setting and problem exploration using mobile devices in the real castle.

Collaborative understanding of scientiﬁc and social aspects of threats to the environment and public health for adults. Participants role-play as teams of scientists investigating contaminated water using networked handheld devices in a ﬁeld setting.

Collaborative problem solving and experiences with learning arts for adults. Teams assume the roles of medical experts to battle a threatening virus using gaming and communication devices in a room and outdoors.

Concepts including genetics and experimental design for school-age children. Groups of students use handheld devices while physically interacting with each other to simulate the genetic actions of reproduction.

Concepts including population economics and mathematics for school-age children. Groups of students use handheld devices while physically interacting with each other to simulate interactions between populations and resources

Concepts including epidemics, scientiﬁc method, population growth for school-age children. Groups of students use handheld devices while physically interacting with each other to simulate the spread of disease

So what’s next?

These old games have built-in educational value, they strive to be more fun than traditional classroom lessons, and most importantly – they achieve it while detaching children from the screen.

Welcome to the climax of ISMAR ’08. On stage the 9 “gods” of the augmented reality community. And they are siting in a panel to muse about the next 10 years of augmented reality.

Dieter Schmalstieg took on the unenviable job of moderating this crowd of big wigs. See if he can curb them down to 3 minutes each.

Here is a blow-by-blow coverage of their thoughts.

Ron Azuma (HRL)

The only way for AR to succeed is when we insert AR into our daily lives – it has to be available all the time (like Thad Starner from GA Tech which always wears his computer)
Ron asks – What if we succeed? what are the social ramifications? those who have thought about it are science fiction writers…such as Vernor Vinge (have you read Rainbows End and Synthetic Serendipity.)

Reinhold Behringer (Leeds)

AR is at the threshold of broad applications.
Cameras, GPS, bandwidth have improved immensely – split into lo-fi AR, approximate registration, low end hardware. and also hi end AR, live see through displays, etc.
What’s missing is APIs, common frameworks, ARML descriptor (standardization)

Mark Billinghurst (HitLab NZ)

Mobility (now) – It took 10 years to go from backpack to palm
Ubiquity (5+ years) – how will AR devices work with other devices (TV, home theater, …),
Sociability – it took us 10 years to go from 2 to 4 to 8 users . When will we have massive scale?
Next is AR 2.0 with massive user generated content and a major shift from technology to user interaction

Steve Feiner – Columbia

AR means “The world = your user interface”
What will it take to make this possible?
Backpacks are ridiculous; handheld devices will look ridiculous 5 years from now – so don’t write off eyewear.
A big one is dynamic global databases for identification/tracking of real world objects. Tracking could be viewed as “just” search (granted a new kind of search.)
There is more to AR than registration; AR presentations need to be designed (AR layouts).

Gudrun Klinker – TU Munchen

|ntegrating AR with ubiquitous. We are interfacing with reality, with our senses and others are mental. We need those lenses to connect to our “senses” (not just visually – it could also be sound, etc). Combining the virtual with the real – where is the information? and can we see it? How do we communicate with the stationary world? We need to connect with the room we are in and hear the “story”. The devices at least need to talk to each other.
We also need to think about “augmented” building, they do not evolve as fast as cell phones. Another aspect is how are we going to survive “this thing”. We need much more usability studies and connect it with real world applications. The ultimate test (I challenge you to show it in next year’s competition) is a navigation system for runners. It’s easy to do it for cars – but may be harder for people.

The simplest idea is getting into the operation room – combining X Ray and optics as part of the common operating workflow.
Next is fusion of pre/intra operative functional and anatomical imaging; patient motion tracking and deformable registration; adaptive, intuitive and interactive visualization; Integration into surgical workflow
Finally we need to focus on changing the culture of surgeons (e.g. training with AR simulation).

Haruo Takemura – Osaka University

Showing a table comparing the pros and cons of hardware platforms: e.g. mobile have potential benefits vs HMD (but also drawbacks – such as processing power); desktop is cheap and powerful but not mobile (tethered).
Cell phones have another issue – they are tied to the carriers which is problematic for developers.

Bruce Thomas – UniSA

We are extremely interdisciplinary – and should keep it up.
However with so many of these it’s hard to develop and evaluate. And by the way innovation is difficult to articulate.
We are in a “Neat vs. Scruffy” situation – the bottom line is that a smaller self-contained pieces of research is easier to get in front of the community – and get results.

Questions floating:
is high end or low end AR the goal?
is ubiquity in AR realistic or wishful thinking?
are we innovative/.
Does augmented reality need to make more money to survive?
Platforms: Don’t write off eyewear?
Social: what if we succeed with AR?
What is the position of ISMAR in the scientific community?

A controvertial question from the audience to the panel: How many of you have subject matter expert working in your office on a daily basis? (few hands) How many of you have artists working a daily basis? (even fewer hands) How many of your research have reached the real world? (once again – few hands)

A question from the audience about the future of HMD. Mark takes the mic and asks the audience:

How many of you would wear a head mounted display? (5 hands)

How many of you would wear a head mounted display that looks like a normal glasses? (75% of the audience raise hands)

Dieter asks the panel members to conclude with one sentence each (no semi columns…)

Ron: I want to refer to the comment that the cell phone is too seductive. We should make it indispensable so users won’t want to give it up – just like a cell phone.

Mark: We need to make sure that children, grandparents, in Africa and everywhere – could use AR

Steve: You ain’t seen nothing yet; look at the progress we have made in the last 10 years! No one can predict what will happen.

Gudrun: We have to be visionary and on the other hand. We need to be realistic and make sure RA doesn’t end up like AI…don’t build hopes in areas where people shouldn’t have them…don’t let AR get burned…

Nassir: Next event we should include designers and experts from other disciplines; and create solutions that go beyond the fashion

Haruo: Maybe combining information like Googles with devices

Bruce: I want you to have fun and be passionate about what you do! We can change the world!